We all know that there is no shortage of first person shooters, so we have to make our choice of which ones we want to play. However, we’ve been accustomed to the fact that most first person shooters have a price, and run on either Windows or a game console.

Yes, the “best” first person shooters will probably be available on only those platforms (with exceptions, mainly through tricks and hacks), but today I’m featuring a first person shooter that breaks away from that stereotype.

About the Game

Urban Terror is self-described as a Hollywood tactical shooter, and values a fun experience over realism (although its realism is quite alright with default settings). Playing Urban Terror over other games such as Call of Duty has a couple of advantages. The game engine (though not the game data built around the engine) is open source. Urban Terror is natively available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The game maintains very high frame rates while offering great graphics, though some maps are better than others. It also offers other features that you expect, such as multiplayer (which is the game’s speciality, as there is no single player mode), and a decent array of weapons to choose from.

Installation

Installation should go as normal. Linux users may have to add additional repositories to get a package for their respective distributions, otherwise you can download the game from the game’s website and run the executable. Windows Vista and Windows 7 users may need to change a few things by right-clicking on the new shortcut, and choosing options like “disable desktop compositing” and “run as administrator” for the game to work.

First Launch

When you launch the game for the first time, you’ll be prompted to enter in a name, which will identify you in all games you take part in. In case you’re new to first person shooters, it’s recommended to use usernames, not actual names. You can also take part in a tutorial to learn the basics of the game.

Before you jump onto a server and play a round, you should probably look through the settings to make sure that you have everything set as you want it. This especially holds true for the graphics settings, where you may still want to lower the settings if you’re not running on good hardware. When everything’s set, you can click on “Play Online” to choose a server (whether over the Internet or via LAN, where you can start a LAN server by choosing “Start Server” instead) and start play.

Different Gameplay

Note that there are different types of gameplay. They are Free For All, Team Deathmatch, Team Survivor, Follow The Leader, Capture And Hold, Capture The Flag, and Bomb Mode. These different styles of gameplay do make a difference in how you should proceed in the game as they each have different goals for winning, so please be aware of this.

If you or a friend ever run a custom, dedicated server (separate from the basic server you can start with the client game), you can tweak almost all aspects of the way the game can be played. Private servers often play around with gravity values, allowing you to jump over great distances. There are also public “Zombie” servers, where it is customized so that one team has no weapons except the mandatory knives, while the other team is well-prepared by default with heavy artillery. On those servers, normal bullets induce very little damage on a “Zombie”, while snipers do slightly more. Provided you have the accuracy, grenades and knives usually do the most damage (their values are unchanged).

Screenshots

Looking Towards the Future

Urban Terror’s future looks fairly bright. Although new development still seems slow, developers are working on a new version that will bring a load of new features. This new version is currently available as an alpha for Windows only.

Conclusion

Urban Terror is a great, fun game that virtually anyone can enjoy. Many people will find joy in the fact that the game values fun over accurate realism for this kind of game. I’ve been playing it for many months by now, and I still look forward to playing it when I have some free time. Any questions will most likely be answered in the documentation. If you have some free space on your hard drive, why not install it? It’ll be there when you have the urge to try it.

i have some friends in oK but damn, that server is horrible, 99% of the players there dont know how to play and/or just sit there shitting their pants trying to take a kill mostly by luck, ppl actually trying to avoid this game should go somewhere else, pugbot.com is a good option.

I suggested this game to people before and they uninstalled after days because of the rude, infantile children attempting to play this game.

Those hardcore CS players that refer to Urban Terror as a game for no skillers aren't far wrong. Also 90% Of the time this game is not run-n-gun at all.

Development is slow as hell, they lie about mac and linux builds knowing they wont be ready then after apologising for 5 (almost 7 months and still nothing now) months the dev/admin "Bladekiller" thinks its funny to use any loophole and tell people to pretty much stfu and make out the alpha releases was never intended to be released the same time, after 5 months of apologising and promises.. total BS.

The dev team are also a bunch of nazi's wirth superiority complex that spend more then half their work time actually just having a tongues tonsil deep in each others assholes, bring up any little thing and they will do their best to ban/silence/mute/discredit you and avoid any facts they don't like.

Game: 8/10
People behind the game: -7/10
People playing the game: 4/10

Urban Terror uses the engine code from the GPL'd ioquake3, yet violates ioquake3's GPL license by not making its source open.

Also, because Urban Terror is closed source and doesn't allow for proper modding, they shot themselves in the foot by having hack-mods (like the horrible 64 player and zombie mods talked about in this article) dilute the core game. If they allowed for proper mods, then this article would be about Urban Terror and a couple separate mods for it, but instead, this article presents this crappy stuff (64 players, zombie) as actually *being* normal Urban Terror when it is not. (Not the fault of the author of this article, the fault of the UrT developers.)

Guest, you're dumb. UrT devs didn't design those mods, members of the community did. Sure, Urban Terror is a game that is taken very seriously by some, especially those who play competitively in leagues like ESL, FTWgl, etc. I can agree that those mods "dilute" the image of the game, but IMO it's not a big deal considering there are 25+ 'normal' servers for every mod server.

If you want to look at things from that sort of perspective, then the author is at fault for misrepresenting the game. These types of mods have been popular since they were born. Although most skilled players tend to avoid them like the plague, I think that they DO play into the fundamental core of this article. The author wanted to present this game in a way that creates a spark of interest for a variety of people.

Personally, I'm not blaming anybody. UrT is what it is, the most fun FPS game out there with a tightly knit community that will troll you one day and have your back the next.

Professional Counter-Strike Player here. I can say that without a doubt, Urban Terror is the funnest FPS game out there. Although CS is more popular and offers a variety of leagues for different levels of skill, nothing can outmatch Urban Terror. Its fast-paced gameplay is balanced perfectly with realism.

At first I was turned off by UrT because of the way it looked. I figured, how could a game like this possibly have a competitive scene? WELL, like I mentioned in the previous paragraph, UrT might not be as popular as CS, but there are plenty of people who play seriously.

Overall, FANTASTIC game. One piece of advice: don't give up on it your first time playing, it really does take some getting used to. Have fun!

Because it offers 64 player slot so many noobs rush to enter the server not knowing that even the Clan Leader is full of xxx.

Marcuskreutzer

July 23, 2011 at 10:36 pm

out of all the servers they post a screenshot taken on one owned by one of worst UrT clans. oK clan is THE worst clan ever, they show no respect for players and their admins are worse than kids on a power trip.
I suggest to anyone that wants to try this game to avoid that server.

Ohh. No respect for players? This comes from the player who kept calling everyone a nigger and faggot and was banned for impersonation and admin and wearing the oK tag. That sounds like a respectful person.

The timing was an unfortunate coincidence. Posts on MakeUseOf are scheduled at least one week in advance and obviously we had no way of knowing in advance what would happen in Oslo yesterday.

We apologise if you are offended but as I said, it was just an unfortunate coincidence. It goes without saying that what happened in Oslo was absolutely horrific and us publishing a post about Urban Terror should not be interpreted as MakeUseOf condoning what happened.

Danny Stieben

July 23, 2011 at 10:43 pm

I'm sorry if anyone was offended by the timing, this was not on purpose. Nor was it meant that this would have any relation with the incident. All I can say is that the article was written and submitted before the incident occurred.